Articles

This article describes the evolution of the design of Vannevar Bush's Memex, tracing its roots
in Bush's earlier work with analog computing machines, and his understanding of the technique of
associative memory. It argues that Memex was the product of a particular engineering culture,
and that the machines that preceded Memex — the Differential Analyzer and the Selector in
particular — helped engender this culture, and the discourse of analogue computing itself.

With Humanities Computing and New Media identified as emerging fields of significant strength,
it is time for well-funded and fully supported programs in Digital Humanities to be described,
developed, and implemented in the university. This article is a description of an attempt to
build such a program from the ground up, rather than from the top down. That is, the authors and
others created a series of courses, both multi-disciplinary and disciplinary, a database, and a
core course designed to make digital humanities a reality, even without having it certified as a
program by the governing bodies of their faculty and university. In this article, the database
and core course are described in some detail in order to offer what the authors believe to be
worthwhile ideas to others who would advance the cause of digital humanities. The article
concludes with some concrete suggestions on how to ensure support, to make faculty participation
possible, to measure success, and to motivate students.

Art historically relevant visual knowledge can be deconstructed and the resulting
components of this visual knowledge — visual discernments — lend themselves to be
socially negotiated. Individual visual experts (like connoisseurs) do not share some
grand and undividable cognitive cataloguing system; they are attentive to piecemeal
visual discernments and the patterns in which these occur in reality. In
conventional scholarly communication sophisticated tools to discuss perceptual
patterns are lacking. This paper not only proposes a theoretical model of visual
knowledge accumulation, but also describes a practical implementation, Art.Similarities, which is designed as a prototype of such
a sophisticated tool. Using a custom-made interface it records visual behavior: the
non-verbally expressed visual similarity judgments of distributed individuals. Users
can be assigned to groups according to the qualities of their judgments. These
qualities may be distilled from emerging similarity patterns. The implications of
individual judgments in different user groups may vary considerably. Emerging
patterns can be assessed both according to human analysis and statistical
procedures. Most studies on art evaluation are attentive to either the
characteristics of works, or the characteristics of observers. In this study both
are considered as interdependent entities consistently.